When you eat food, the body digests the macronutrients: carbohydrates, proteins – actually many different amino acids – and fats. (Anything it can’t digest, like alcohol or fiber or toxins, either passes right on through or, if it makes it into the bloodstream, gets filtered by your liver.). Your body operates not in terms of grams and calories but in terms of fuel. If you eat more fuel than your body needs – which most people do – the body is forced to store this excess. This ability to store excess fuel was an evolutionary imperative in a world that was in a state of constant “feast or famine” 50,000 years ago. Humans became very efficient fuel storage specialists and were able to survive the rigors of a hostile environment and pass those very same genes down to you and me.

Bear in mind that every type of carbohydrate you eat is eventually converted to a simple form of sugar known as glucose, either directly in the gut or after a brief visit to the liver. The truth is, all the bread, pasta, cereal, potatoes, rice, fruit, dessert, candy, and sodas you eat and drink eventually wind up as glucose. While glucose is a fuel, it is actually quite toxic in excess amounts unless it is being burned inside your cells, so the body has evolved an elegant way of getting it out of the bloodstream quickly and storing it in those cells.

It does this by having the liver and the muscles (spent during hard anaerobic exercise ) store some of the excess glucose as glycogen. Specialized beta cells in your pancreas sense the abundance of glucose in the bloodstream after a meal and secrete insulin, a peptide hormone whose job it is to allow glucose (and fats and amino acids) to gain access to the interior of muscle and liver cells.

But here’s the catch: once those cells are full, as they are almost all the time with inactive people, the rest of the glucose is converted to fat. Saturated fat.

Insulin was one of the first hormones to evolve in living things. Virtually all animals secrete insulin as a means of storing excess nutrients. It makes perfect sense that in a world where food was often scarce or non-existent for long periods of time, our bodies would become so incredibly efficient. How ironic, though, that it’s not fat that gets stored as fat – it’s sugar. And that’s where insulin insensitivity and this whole type 2 diabetes issue get confusing for most people…..

If we go back 10,000 or more years, we find that our ancestors had very little access to sugar – or any carbohydrates for that matter. There was some fruit here and there, a few berries, roots and shoots, but most of their carbohydrate fuel was locked inside a very fibrous matrix. In fact, some paleo-anthropologists suggest that our ancestors consumed, on average, only about 80 grams of carbohydrate a day. Compare that to the 350-600 grams a day in the typical diet/food today. The rest of their diet consisted of varying degrees of fat and protein. And as fibrous (and therefore complex) as those limited carbohydrate foods were, their effect on raising insulin was minimal. In fact, there was so little carbohydrate/glucose in our ancestor’s diet that we evolved four ways of making extra glucose ourselves and only one way of getting rid of the excess we consume!

Today when we eat too many carbohydrates, the pancreas pumps out insulin exactly as the DNA blueprint tell it to, but if the liver and muscle cells are already filled with glycogen, those cells start to become resistant to the call of insulin. The insulin “receptor sites” on the surface of those cells start to decrease in number as well as in efficiency. Since the glucose can’t get into the muscle or liver cells, it remains in the bloodstream. Now the pancreas senses there’s still too much toxic glucose in the blood, so it frantically pumps out even more insulin, which causes the insulin receptors on the surface of those cells to become even more resistant, because excess insulin is also toxic! Eventually, the insulin helps the glucose finds it way into your fat cells, where it is stored as fat. Again – because it bears repeating – it’s not fat that gets stored in your fat cells – it’s sugar.

Over time, as we continue to eat high carbohydrate diets and exercise less, the degree of insulin resistance increases. Unless we take dramatic steps to reduce carbohydrate intake and increase exercise, we develop several problems that only get worse over time – and the drugs don’t fix it.

"From the NET"

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Sugar does not necessarily “cause” diabetes ".... Read further in Part II

Sometimes truth is not sweet. So people do not like it. But atleast people with diabetes ( I am one) should like it. Atleast they should ponder over it (LCHF) with out any bias. What is at stake is not somebody else's health....It is ours. We are dummies alright, but atleast for once! Let us eat sensibly.....

Chromium as a mineral supplement, is of interest to people with diabetes as it has been suggested that Chromium Picolinate could be particularly suitable for lowering blood sugar levels.

Chromium helps maintain normal serum cholesterol levels and also helps to control the production of insulin. It increases immunity, regulates blood sugar, food cravings, and the body’s use of proteins, carbohydrates, and fats.

Chromium is sometimes called glucose tolerance factor (gtf). Very small amounts of organic Chromium that is found in the blood, is extremely important in aiding insulin in glucose metabolism. Chromium, the active factor in the substance GTF-glucose tolerance factor makes insulin more effective. Chromium deficiency is relatively common in patients with Type II diabetes and may impair the function of GTF, causing the uptake of glucose into cells to become less efficient. In fact without Chromium, insulin can't do its job. It can help prevent diabetes or hypoglycemia or help those with diabetes and hypoglycemia get by with less insulin. As one gets older less Chromium is retained in the body.

Our refined oils contain no chromium. And even raw sugar contains 83 percent more chromium than the refined white product! ( I would not prefer to get my chromium from sugar!).Not only do these foods not supply chromium, they contribute to the loss of the chromium supply you were born with, because they use up some of your chromium stores in their metabolism. And our refined diet not only robs us of our chromium, it literally robs us of our health.

What does Chromium have to do with diabetes? Both celiac disease and diabetes are major contributors to the epidemic of magnesium deficiency and chromium deficiency. Chromium deficiency is associated with 1. hyperglycemia 2. hyperinsulinism/insulin-resistance 3. insulin-dependent diabetes (IDDM, Type 1) 4. adult-onset diabetes (NIDDM, Type 2) 5. gestational diabetes (diabetes of pregnancy) 6. corticosteroid-induced diabetes

According to an Associate Professor of Medicine at University of Vermont: “Prior human studies have suggested that chromium picolinate, an easily absorbed form, decreases insulin levels and improves blood sugar metabolism in both obese people and people with type 2 diabetes.“Essentially all the studies using chromium picolinate supplementation for impaired glucose intolerance and diabetes showed a positive effect.” There are other forms of chromium in less absorbable form. Recent studies suggest that chromium can prevent type II diabetes, or insulin resistance. Chromium functions by increasing the activity of insulin, thus reducing the amount of insulin required to control blood-sugar levels. When sufficient levels of chromium are present much lower amounts of insulin are required. The results of several studies suggest that chromium may play a role in controlling diabetes and heart disease.

Glycation is responsible for many of the complications of diabetes, a process that chromium inhibits. During a study to assess the effects of chromium on glycosylated hemoglobin levels, there was improvement in both chromium-treated groups. Glycosylated hemoglobin (a measurement of average blood glucose) over a 2- to 3-month period was (on an average) 6.6% in the high dose group, 7.5% in the low-dose group, and 8.

For example, in diabetes, because of all the refined foods we eat, we have created a deficiency of chromium because chromium is pulled out of our own tissues to help metabolize the refined foods, which no longer have the chromium needed to metabolize them. The long-term result is a deficiency in chromium. So when we are taking in lots of refined carbohydrates and need chromium to help metabolize the sugar and to make the insulin work correctly, we become chromium deficient.

Symptoms of chromium deficiency - increased glucose, insulin, total cholesterol, and triglycerides - resemble those of prediabetes. This certainly doesn't mean that chromium alone will reverse prediabetes; however, many studies have shown that either chromium polynicotinate or chromium picolinate supplements do in fact improve insulin function and can lead to improved glucose tolerance. Based on the research, the most effective dose of chromium appears to be 1,000 mcg,

The fact that chromium makes the cells more sensitive to insulin has been borne out by studies done with people who had Type 2 diabetes. Often, those who have Type 2 diabetes have a chromium deficiency, which appears to make them more susceptible to the condition.

As One caution: there is no reason to set an upper limit (UL) for Chromium chromium interacts with other medications and should only be taken after consulting a doctor or physician or a health care expert. Chromium could have an influence on the neurotransmitters, some experts think that the supplement could harm individuals who suffer from depression, bipolar disorder or schizophrenia.

I am no fan of MLM companies. But still, let us take look for foods with chromium.